Lego 58 Model 42065

There was a mini Lego season recently and this is the first beast from that. Ladies and Gentlemen I give you the RC Racer:

42065 Side
42065 Side

This beast uses a lovely little IR transmission system. It’s pretty well designed and have 4 channels just in case you are near other systems.

42065 Head On
42065 Head On

Possibly the only drawback is that the battery pack takes SIX AA batteries, but then that does give a decent about of power. It’s the same battery pack as the Excavator I built about a year ago.

Exposing The Innards
Exposing The Innards

In this picture (above) you can see the right (front) and left (rear) motors along with the battery pack and IR receiver.

42065 3/4 View
42065 3/4 View

Tomb Raider

Having ranted and raged about the entitlement in the film Peter Rabbit you might be interested to know that I’m going to completely ignore the quantities of privilege in this film.

I went to the cinema. We know the drill. I write something about the tide without even knowing when that started, but knowing it was a coded reference to the time of day within a movie review because I went when I shouldn’t have. The tide was middling. For a while I was the only person in the cinema and that would have been nice for the whole film but people came in. I think my record for a film is me and one other person, two sad gits together, not that we were together but you understand.

My routine in the cinema is to normally stuff my face with either ice cream or hot dogs [don’t tell the vegetarian police] and then I read a book on my kindle-phone app while stuff non-feature-film occurs on screen. I don’t watch adverts and I watch each trailer once unless it’s an important film [Star Wars, Blade Runner] in which case I don’t watch. Some trailers I watch a little of before ignoring them because I know I won’t be going to see it [Mama Mia 2]. The book I am reading currently is

Dressing for Altitude, U.S. Aviation Pressure Suits-Wiley Post to Space Shuttle – By Dennis R. Jenkins

It’s a free e-book from Nasa and it is quite fascinating. It’s technical enough to challenge my understanding and written well enough to keep me interested. I have read a book on the X-15 program mostly while waiting for films to start and that one was brilliant. Quite technical writing has also helped when I’ve been broken and unable to think about things properly. Having decent technical challenging data and writing restores the balance of logic in my mind when it’s been screwed over. I do still intend to write about the two main times I’ve been quite mental but getting that stuff down in text is going to be hard.

So, the film, Tomb Raider. I rated it on IMDB and now is where I point you to the communication discussing the rating system and then I normally comment that the scoring system is broken and I may get around to addressing that at some point.

I enjoyed this film. I didn’t enjoy the two women behind me talking constantly through the film but I still enjoyed the film.

Let’s face facts: it’s a film based on a best selling game. Therefore we don’t expect it to be great. We expect it to be clichéd and full of stupid action. Guess what? It is. It was a perfect film covering a good game series. It was probably better than the Jolie version and that’s saying something as I can be a bit of a Jolie fan.

In all honesty, if you want a decent movie in this genre then you should watch Raiders Of The Lost Ark. It does all the things that this film does but far far better. But. Indiana Jones isn’t female.

A couple of minor points that struck me in this. When Lara is riding her bike around London, which is looking lovingly cosmopolitan and resplendent, her chain/gears creak. I’m not sure if this was designed so that we know she’s cycling, I mean she is peddling, but no decent biker would put up with that creaking. They would fix it.

The next point is people in these movies seem to get punctured in many un-sexy ways and yet they don’t bleed out or get infected. It’s almost like they are fixed within minutes and able to run around at 100%.

Finally, Hannah John-Kamen was in this movie for about 3 minutes and it was lovely to see her in something where she isn’t playing Dutch. I am currently watching Killjoys on Netflix and she stars in that show.

Rationalisation

I spent some time yesterday dusting the AV corner in the lounge. There’s a fair amount of kit there and dust had built up. While doing that I realised that I don’t need the PS3 there anymore. I don’t play it. I had kept it lying around for GT6 in the days before GT Sport. Now the game is on the PS4. There are probably a few legacy games I will miss but I don’t have the time to play them!

This is a picture of the cabling I cleared out:

AV Kit
AV Kit

I decided I don’t need the Blu-Ray player connected to the LAN, nor the Amp. It’s likely I don’t need the Blu-Ray player there at all because of the PS4 but I’ll leave it there for another day.

MV 22B

I spent real money on a computer game add-in. Like I really pressed the “buy” button with the full knowledge that it was going to cost me money. However, I think it was worth it. I have spend actual £ on an F-18, and F-35 and now a MV22B Osprey.

There are real ospreys that fly over Lake Bassenthwaite in the Lake District and now I have my own [made from steel, although more likely carbon fibre as it’s a very expensive aircraft].

MV-22B Keswick Approach
MV-22B Keswick Approach
MV-22B Head-On Lake District
MV-22B Head-On Lake District
MV-22B Keswick Take Off
MV-22B Keswick Take Off
MV-22B Lining Up With Runway
MV-22B Lining Up With Runway

What a lovely looking beast. I haven’t managed a successful landing yet. But I will keep trying.

Correction

In this picture from yesterday’s communication I noticed that the author has named Graham Hill. The downhill section from Druids to Graham Hill Bend.

Brands Hatch, Kent, UK
Brands Hatch, Kent, UK

By John ChapmanOwn work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

This naming is incorrect. While that section of track is informally called Graham Hill it is not named anything officially.

The corner is most definitely named Graham Hill Bend but the downhill section is name-less. It is occasionally and informally referred to as Graham Hill, but clearly should be called Graham Hill Hill if it was going to be named correctly.

Corners Not Mastered

Here, just for fun, is a list of corners I still strugglw with in Gran Turismo Sport. I can’t consistently take these corners in a manner that makes me feel I’m getting the lowest lap time.

Brands Hatch, Kent, UK
Brands Hatch, Kent, UK

 

Mount Panorama, Australia
Mount Panorama, Australia

 

Monza, Italy
Monza, Italy

 

Nurburgring GP, Germany
Nurburgring GP, Germany

 

Nurburgring Nordschleife, Germany
Nurburgring Nordschleife, Germany

 

Spa Francorchamps, Belgium
Spa Francorchamps, Belgium

 

Willow Springs, USA
Willow Springs, USA

 

Suzuka, Japan
Suzuka, Japan

 

Interlagos, Brazil
Interlagos, Brazil

Lo-Tech

I clicked on a click-bait type link on Twitter a few days ago and watched a video for the Light Phone 2. It’s a lovely looking basic phone that does phone calls, messaging and alarms. This has got me thinking [a rare event I know!].

Perhaps it would be good to just have a phone. A device designed to make phone calls. Send the odd text message. Not a lot else.

This morning as I thought these things I felt a sense of release from the pressure of modern communication. There was a release growing. The freedom to be away from connections. The freedom to not know what is going on.

So, I’ve been looking at basic phones. I have a plan to use a basic phone. To get one and leave the smart phone at home and just have the basic phone. Get rid of the connections to the world. A chance to be free when I want to be.

I can edit this website at home. I can use a camera to take photos. I can read a book. I can removed myself from the constant drivel and pain that following the news brings at the moment. This is looking like a very real prospect for me. A chance to recapture my freedom and to learn to live my life again. And I say that as a committed tech follower.

Garage Issues

Spent a short while last night reading through some discussion groups about how to fix my garage issues within Gran Turismo Sport mentioned in this communication. I found a good level of discussion over at GT Planet and came up with a possible method for returning my cars.

I am a member of Playstation Plus and so my saved games are backed up regularly to the PS+ servers. If the save data there is old enough I might be able to download that save file and restore my garage. There was an anxious wait while I started the PS4 and hoped that it hadn’t uploaded my save file anytime in the last 48 hours. When I could see the remote storage space I did indeed see that the game save file was over a week old. I think this is largely to do with me turning the PS4 off correctly rather than leaving it in stand-by mode all the time. I suspect that if I had left it in rest mode the remote save file would have been newer and I would not be as cheery today.

I was able to download the remote file and overwrite the local version. Then I had to start the game and wait.

The game loaded fine and the car shown on the homescreen was, in fact, one of those that had disappeared. So, I was confident that my cars were back. Shortly after that the game must have synced some information with the GT servers because I received 4 cars for completing my “daily workout”. My money wasn’t restored and the few races I had done over the last week were blank again but at least there was success in getting my cars back.

So, thanks to me turning off the PS4 and not using rest mode I think I have managed to restore the garage and my happiness. Once I did get into the garage it turns out I have over 200 cars and my initial estimate of 100 was quite low!

Now it’s fixed:

Here’s the photo that I wanted to take a few nights ago that started this all off:

EBM Ferrari at Monza
EBM Ferrari at Monza

Garage Failure

I am annoyed. Very annoyed and if I make it through this communication without using expletives I will be fucking impressed.

Yesterday I logged into Gran Turismo Sport. I wasn’t going to play but you get bonuses when you’ve logged in for 100 days etc and I thought a couple of minutes looking at the new user content would entertain me.

On the screen the Monza scapes icon was glowing with a little red dot meaning I hadn’t looked at it since the last update. Well, I thought, I could take a couple of photos of my own cars around the iconic circuit. So, I opened up the Scapes option and then chose a decent corner with some nice rumble strips. Then I went to add one of my own cars to the scene and that is where rage starts.

I ONLY HAD 26 CARS IN MY GARAGE

I have spent a lot of in-game credits building up my garage with lovely new cars and a few of them I have used for a significant amount of races and set them up so they behave in a way that I can drive fast.

AND THEY WEREN’T IN THE GARAGE

Somehow, about 60 cars have disappeared from my garage. They don’t show up in my custom liveries as they aren’t IN MY GARAGE.

I am going to get in touch with support at some point and I hope they can fix this. I am quite annoyed. I have earnt around 20,000,000 in-game credits and so have spent around that much too. I am so pissed off I might even have to say “bollocks” to this game and just fucking quit.

If the magicians can get my data back then I will be happy. I’m not even sure why that particular group of 26 cars still exists in the garage. My main concern is that every time you make an action in the game it saves the data. It is possible that the save file with all my cars in has been over written many times. I’ve also tried rebooting the PS4 in case it has some bizarre reason to do with the machine itself but no success there. Fuck this shit.